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David Gerard writes "Wine (the Windows not-an-emulator for Unix) runs Windows applications more often than not. (Certainly more often than Vista does.) Dan Kegel on the wine-users mailing list/forum has started gathering apps that declare Wine a supported platform. And there's now a Wine Support Honor Roll page on the Wine wiki. We need more apps that work with Wine stating that they consider it a supported platform. If you write Win32 open source or shareware, please open yourself to the wider market!"

And it's a David Gerard article - the guy is a professional Internet troll (responsible for such classy internet sites as lemonparty.org, yourmom.org, and k-k-k.com - don't visit), and part time Wikipedia admin/Wikimedia UK spokesperson (where his favorite pastimes are blocking entire US states for being sockpuppets of banned user, and so forth, this [wikipediareview.com] makes an amusing read). Why am I unsurprised?

/. needs a healthy does of text book logic lessons. Categorical statements such as this not only remove any credibility from the article, they set a tone on/. that encourages more such statements, and so on. This sort of sophomoric drivel in the comments is to be expected, but it has no place in the submissions (at least not those which get green-lighted).

You're right that it's probably an exaggeration, and I'm sure that any honest Wine user will agree. I love it and use it often but I've had my fair share of getting Windows apps to work correctly, whereas I've had few problems getting things to run on my Vista PC at work.

However, I also think it's an exaggeration to say that "There is no way Wine is more compatible." In my experience, though unlikely, it is possible. More than once I've actually seen app run faster and with more stability in Wine than on

This is what gives Slashdot a bad name: completely false (or exaggerated) negative statements in order to promote your own ideas.

Yeah. I use WINE a lot, I've gotten very used to tweaks like switching windows versions, installing overrides, applying winetricks scripts, putting separate applications in their own WINEPREFIX with separate configuration, manually copying files, applying registry settings, even compiling a few custom versions of WINE and so on. Honestly, it's impressive what you can do with a lot of custom tweaks. But, if you think it's anything like running it on native Windows let me just take as an example of a game that works well BUT:

HOWTO

This is an attempt to summarize the steps needed to run World In Conflict and to compile a list of tweaks to make the game run as smootly as possible, if you have any additions, please make a reply with the subject "Extra tips for WiC!" and it will be tested, and if verified, added to this howto.

1. Read this before starting

Creating a seperate wine configuration directory for this game is recommended if you do not want to affect the environment of other applications/games that you run under Wine. This can be done for any of your other games, and it is an effective way to assure that your wine settings match those in this HowTo. It is however not strictly required.

World in Conflict should be run with Wine version 1.1.4 or later as it provides best performance, includes several bugs fixes relevant to the game, and support for copy protection.

Observe that we set the variable WINEPREFIX at the beginning of the line. This will determine which directory Wine should work with. If the directory does not exist yet and/or has not been initialized by Wine, it will be automatically created and initialized before Setup.exe is run. If WINEPREFIX is not specified, your default Wine directory will be '$HOME/.wine/'.

Using the setup program, install the game to it's default directory and choose not to run the game after install - we're not done yet. In addition to the files copied automatically during installation, you'll have to copy over several files from the DVD to the directory the game was installed to. Usually, this should be 'drive_c/Program Files/Sierra Entertainment/World in Conflict' inside your Wine directory. The files to copy are:

binkw32.dll, dbghelp.dll, mss32.dll(From the 'bin' directory on the DVD)

Previously, it was necessary to install a crack for this game. Beginning with recent versions of Wine (~1.1 and later), this is no longer required. However, if we attempted to start the game now, it would crash right away. This is because World In Conflict comes with optional support for DirectX 10. As DirectX 10 is currently not supported in Wine, we need to disable it.

In addition, due to a few missing functions in Wine, the game would currently not be able to detect the hardware of your computer properly. Until these functions are supported in Wine, we will use Microsoft's original DLL to do the job for us. Therefore, get the file dxdiagn.dll from dlldump and save it to the 'drive_c/windows/system32' folder in your Wine directory:

Now let's instruct Wine about DirectX 10 and the dxdiagn.dll. Open a console and enter:WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine-wic" winecfg

Click the Libraries tab, type in d3d10 under New override for library and click Add. You'll now see "d3d10 (native,builtin), hit Edit and select Disabled and hit OK. Then again under New override for library, type in dxdiagn and click Add. You'll now see "dxdiagn (native,builtin)" added to the

WOOOOOSH. He meant Wine is more compatible with Windows apps than Windows Vista is. He wasn't comparing the installed user base of each. Now his statement was an hyperbole meant to poke fun of Windows Vista breaking many apps when it got released and so it's probably not very accurate. It was meant as a joke. Your response should've been : Haha, moving along...

Really? That's... more than a little surprising. On modern programs, Vista is far superior to Wine - blame it on.NET, DirectX, or whatever you want, but wine still struggles to run (and occasionally still fails to install) everything from games to web browsers. I've certainly seen a couple of recent apps - even games - that run truly perfectly in wine, but the most complex one I've seen is Battle for Wesnoth, which has a native Linux version anyhow.

What does the number of users have to do with it? He's talking about Windows apps that run on WINE but not on Vista. And there are a lot of those, if you count apps that with features that are broken under Vista, and don't count apps that will run on Vista if you upgrade to the latest and greatest version.

Even so, he's probably exaggerating and/or overestimating. But the fact remains that there's a nasty degree of API incompatibility between Vista and previous versions of Windows. For example, if you have any version of Adobe Acrobat except the latest, you get a file system error if you try to write certain modifications out to disk. Basic I/O operations broken! That's pretty bad.

That said, I'm less then impressed by the list of "works on WINE" apps. The link is to a forum that mentions precisely two of them. That motivated somebody to start a wiki page with a list. There are maybe 20 very obscure apps on this page, and I'd be surprised if they don't all have Linux native alternatives.

When a major software vendor starts talking about WINE support, then we have a real trend. Not before.

Even so, he's probably exaggerating and/or overestimating. But the fact remains that there's a nasty degree of API incompatibility between Vista and previous versions of Windows. For example, if you have any version of Adobe Acrobat except the latest, you get a file system error if you try to write certain modifications out to disk. Basic I/O operations broken! That's pretty bad.

I'm not so sure he's overestimating! Given how many years Windows XP and Windows 98 were aroung for, it's a safe bet that there are hundreds of times more apps for those two platforms than for Vista. A rather large fraction of those work in Wine. If a decent fraction of them don't work in Vista (and my understanding is that they don't), then just by number of apps Wine probably runs a lot more windows apps than Vista does.

Of course, the vast majority of the apps Wine runs that Vista doesn't are outdated, or have been replaced by newer version that do run in Vista, but for sheer numbers, I think it's a safe bet that Wine wins!

what kind of fucking retarded maths is that, wine has a fraction of the apps xp had so if a fraction of the apps don't work on vista is greater than the piddling amount supported by wine than wine is better?

a quick google of the situation shows these issues are all down to these apps requiring XP/98's poorly thought out security model, requiring access to system components and registry settings. If these software companies refuse to update software to a more secure model than by all means they should be nu

Wine has rather good support for older apps, it's always playing catch-up, but everyone agrees it does old stuff better than Vista does. Lets suppose Vista supports 80% of the old apps, and Wine supports 83% of them (the numbers are made up, but what matters is that Wine is a few points ahead). Then out of every 102 apps (100 98/XP and 2 Vista) Wine supports about 83, and Vista supports 82. I suspect that Wine has a much better than 3% edge for older app support though, and I've assumed that wine has absolu

That said, I'm less then impressed by the list of "works on WINE" apps. The link is to a forum that mentions precisely two of them. That motivated somebody to start a wiki page with a list. There are maybe 20 very obscure apps on this page, and I'd be surprised if they don't all have Linux native alternatives.

Yeah, uTorrent is so obscure...

Other than that, though, pretty much spot on. Most of what's there is really specialized niche stuff, especially something like JWPce.

So just because MS decided to "fix" some API calls to be more secure, remove old calls that should have been removed, and modernize their OS (for better or worse) you're saying that breaking backwards compatibility for some apps wasn't worth it? Even though MS told everyone they were doing it a year or more in advance and those companies didn't fix their software.

When functions in your favorite language get deprecated, what do you do? Do you bitch and moan, calling the lead Dev a money-hungry whore? Or do you say, "nice, they're fixing issues and letting us know before they pull support for good"?

I love bashing MS just as much as the next guy, but expecting backwards compatibility for every version of something is shortsighted and, for progress' sake, stupid. Updating the API and removing old, insecure calls, is one thing I do agree with MS on. Now, I wish Intel and AMD would drop x86...

Sorry, the number of users works the other way. As an app maker, I can guarantee you that I've received more complaints that my app doesn't work in Vista than complaints that my app doesn't work in Wine.

from the perspective of a computer user (my sig should confirm that I am not a developer) perhaps this is because people expect windows apps to work in the windows world because, "we paid good money for this, it had better work"while in the linux world, if an app doesn't work, i am not all that bothered by it, because its free, i paid nothing for it, i will forgive the occasional bug, and if it gets bad enough, there is an alternative out there that is also free.

In wine, having an app that was intended for an entirely different operating system actually work just blows my mind. i would never think to complain to the wine team that "x program won't work"

in windows, when an app fails, it is frustrating because I expect commercial software to be bug free.

(note to linux zealots: please don't mod this flamebait, did you notice how i said "IF a linux app fails" and "WHEN a windows app fails")

i would absolutely love to believe that was the case, but I am forced to read slashdot in windows, because my wifi wont work in ubuntu, even with ndis wrapper. the reply i got was 'use ndis wrapper'in the F/OSS world, my experience has been people who either mis-understand the problem, or ridicule me for not knowing how to code a solution myself, then they wonder why F/OSS doens't take off like it should.

I've got an "Officially Supported" section in Games That Work [ibeentoubuntu.com] which includes Starport Galactic Empires and Soldat running under Wine. I tried to convince Reflexive (since my gal plays hundreds of their website's games) to let me test and certify games so that they could be marked as "Works with Wine 1.0" on the download site. I was snubbed.

Starport Galactic Empires and Soldat are claimed to work on Wine by the publisher. That's a lot more than "should work." Just because you apparently don't think independent games are important doesn't mean that they aren't. In fact, they're probably the easiest to get on the "officially supports Wine" page because they need the extra market wherever they can get it and will do a little testing (maybe even tweaking) to get that exposure.

If you want everything to be EVE Online, you're going to be disappointed

How many developers want to put in the extra effort for a 0.1% wider audience? And consider the Linux crowd has the "free (as in beer) software mentality".... so I figure an even less percentage sales increase.

If joe sixpack asked a linux expert for help, he would probably get laughed at for not knowing how to compile the source of the application he was trying to get to run.

How do I mod parent 'sad-but-true'? Joe Sixpack would also be told to change some parameters and recompile the kernel too. And while you're at it, edit some parameters in a header file before you run./configure. I love that one.:-(

This game developer [wolfire.com] claims that making the game available on less-popular platforms increased his sales by over 122%, perhaps significantly over. This was due to getting a lot of exposure for his game on Mac and Linux sites, when the same game probably would have gotten a footnote on Windows' gaming sites.

How many developers want to put in the extra effort for a 0.1% wider audience?

Developers who find actual numbers, instead of pulling them out of their ass.

And that means doing a little market research. The market for your app may be biased one way or the other. For instance, if you're selling a text editor targeted at programmers -- or better yet, an SCM -- it's probably not too difficult to port, and you'll probably get quite a few grateful Linux users.

consider the Linux crowd has the "free (as in beer) software mentality"....

Can we get past this already? It seems the only Linux folk who have that mentality are complete strawmen created by people who've never actually met a Linux user.

I actually bought Windows XP, despite Linux being my primary OS. Most Windows users I know will pirate it if it didn't come with the machine.

There is one exception to that rule: On Windows, there are tons of little freeware (but closed source) utilities like IrfanView, WinRAR, etc. On Windows, and to a larger extent, OS X, there's even more -- a massive culture of shareware, where tiny cataloging utilities and file management utilities are selling for $10 to $20 each.

So, if your app is something truly useful, sure. I would love to see things like Photoshop support Wine officially (I'll use Gimp when I can, but it still hasn't caught up), and I love that WoW releases Wine-specific patches, and Eve uses Winelib.

But if you're trying to sell me a $15 version of diff or merge, it had better iron my socks, too.

consider the Linux crowd has the "free (as in beer) software mentality"....

Can we get past this already? It seems the only Linux folk who have that mentality are complete strawmen created by people who've never actually met a Linux user.

Or anyone who's spent more than ten minutes in any thread on this site involving Windows, Linux, Macs, the FSF, any FOSS announcement, and probably a hand full of other things.

You can't come here every day, or multiple times a day like people seem to do, and not notice that there are plenty of Linux users who are very eager to post about how all of their software is both free as in s speech AND free as in beer.

That said, I think most people are used to "free as in beer" by this point because Linux is

there are plenty of Linux users who are very eager to post about how all of their software is both free as in s speech AND free as in beer.

There are plenty willing to discuss it. I don't know there are many who are actually under that illusion -- most of us run on nVidia these days, and there are the binary blobs for firmware and such...

That said, I think most people are used to "free as in beer" by this point because Linux is free by choice and the high prices of a lot of proprietary programs has led to such massive rates of piracy...

Then you grow up, and at a real job, you learn things like -- suppose you're already on OS X. It costs a fraction of a single day's pay to buy TextMate, which should improve your productivity by quite a lot.

Bad example, because it's OS X, but you see this kind of thing all the time. People who use Linux, and li

I digress though, my point was that that the idea of the fanatical free linux guy is far from a strawman, I'd just be interested to see how many there are compared to Windows and Mac users who just pirate everything but don't talk about it.

Well, in my experience, the Linux guys are the ones who care the most about the license, and making sure they don't break it. Whether that license is proprietary or F/OSS, linux people are the most likely to pay more than a cursory glance.

I'd easily pay $70 for Flight Simulator X if I could run it in my Linux box. That game was targeted for Vista (albeit runs on XP) but I hate the idea of installing Vista (again) in my laptop (the thought of a virus deleting all my partitions scares me too much.) I would run it with vmware, but the graphic acceleration makes it difficult to impossible.

Since 2004 Linux is my only work OS, and that means that I no longer play as before. I'm always considering buying a desktop PC just for gaming, but the money

That's a harsh way of saying that you don't really have an accurate picture yourself.

That's true enough. But I never claimed to.

Again, this is the kind of thing for which you would need to do real, actual market research in order to find out for yourself. If you're writing a tool for graphic artists, you probably don't have to care about Linux at all. If you're writing a tool for animators and modelers, it's worth considering. If you're writing a tool designed to run on a cluster of servers built from commodity hardware, you'd be stupid not to support Linux.

Because those like yourself who are embedded in the subculture that is Linux do not have an accurate picture of the entire computer ecosystem.

Most if not all of the apps already mentioned have native Free equivalents that are as good, if not better.
Specifically, the majority seem to be DVD or MP3 programs, which are already heavily targeted.
Although, more officially-supported WINE apps is certainly good for regression testing the codebase.

Not listed (yet, I'm about to add it) is the PokerStars client. It's a bit buried, but they do list it as supported in the faq and they offer support for it. That's the closest you'll get to a real-money poker option for Linux.

The problem is developers who write Windows-only code then. There are a decent number of games that are open source that are written using Windows APIs only. Sure, maybe developers like the Windows API but why target one OS? The other thing is.NET. Wine still barely works with it and Microsoft loves that developers find C# easy to use and that most developers using C# are developing Windows-only.NET apps. Yes, there is Mono but it is nowhere near compatible. Purposely kept behind, plus if there's a.NET a

Agreed. They've done a fantastic job, but their job will never be over.

I personally think that reversing that effort would be best. If companies were able to develop solid apps for Linux, and be assured that they would work flawlessly and efficiently in Windows, that would be a better way to kill two birds with one stone.

A major project going this direction is andLinux [andlinux.org], which is basically the opposite of Wine. It uses the coLinux kernel, a port of the Linux kernel for Windows, to allow Linux programs to

I disagree. Why rely upon the buggy Windows kernel to keep things afloat? We do not know exactly how it works, why it does it what it does, etc etc. It is not trustworthy. Linux is because we can see the source code and we compile. We can see the source code of GCC which compiles it. We can see the source code of the GCC that compiles GCC, ad infinitum until we get down to the ASM code that starts up our PCs in the first place.

If developers build for andLinux, that is all it will really support. It is gener

It's like the rest of the OS -- it works for some things, not for others.

However, occasionally, what you need and what Wine/Linux provides sync up perfectly. Then, there are a lot of good reasons to switch -- free-as-in-beer being the obvious one.

As an example: I have tried plenty of programs in Wine, and watched them fail horribly. Others, I simply don't want to sacrifice a dozen FPS and some visual quality to play Portal on Linux, when I can just keep an XP partition around.

I reckon the core of this is more and more realizing the future is diverse when it comes to operating systems. Already some run Microsoft systems, while others run Linux distros or other systems. Coming out with Wine as a supported platform can mean that when a company or person decides to switch to a Linux based system that person know that they can chose one of their familiar alternatives and that it will run under Wine. This not only helps make it easier for certain people to make the switch to a Liunx s

Wine is a cool project. It's even useful, but it isn't nearly as compatible with Windows or DOS aps than Vista. That's just stupid. This is yet another story that leads me to suspect that kdawson is an idiot.

Um, WINEHQ has for a long time had a "Windows port". It's used mostly for testing since substituting the real system files is easier in the actual environment; and some other debugging is easier too. Since the new site layout however I've yet to find the correct link for it, otherwise I would post it.

It's worse than that. Many of the programs on the "platinum" list, which as you noted are supposed to "work flawlessly, no configuration" - don't. If you look at the write-ups people posted saying they tried it and it worked flawlessly, most of them will say they "didn't try" certain features (which are probably the ones you want, and which end up not working) or they even say that there ARE some problems... and in many cases these are serious problems.

But the program starts up, and it's feasible you could get something useful out of it, so it's "platinum" right? Chances are, those couple of things that weren't tried or didn't work quite right are the whole reason anyone wants to use the software in the first place, as in your Starcraft example with multiplayer!

The worst is that it's obvious in some cases that the people who submitted these reports weren't regular users of the software. They apparnetly just installed it and tried it to see if it would work with wine. That's great, seeing if things are compatible, helping out - but seriously, to be helpful you have to know what the program is supposed to do and what people actually use it for.

I'm not trying to incite anyone but I don't think anyone who's looked at the Wine AppDB would disagree with me too much. I appreciate the work people put into it, but there needs to be some better standards for deciding how well software works under Wine. It's hard to recommend Wine for anything when it's a total crapshoot whether comments in the AppDB are correct or not.

I personally don't have need to run anything with Wine, but I have attempted on occasion, and have helped others do so. I do run one piece of Windows software - Adobe Lightroom - but I do so in a Windows VM because Wine support for it is extremely limited.

As I think someone else in here noted, a lot of the really well-supported software is stuff like DVD rippers/burners and "utility" apps, of which there are usually multiple excellent open-source programs available to choose from. That's not the kind of software preventing people from switching to linux. Although, I did give up my favorite DVD burning program, ImgBurn, when I stopped using windows several years ago - it does work pretty much flawlessly under wine actually, but I like k3b too:)

I use ubuntu and it depends. Sometimes I just tolerate the bug because I'm tired of the "New version of ubuntu out does this still effect you?" messages I get.

I could understand if it was something not testable to the person saying that. However when the steps to reproduce are download package x and do xyz I think its simple laziness to not just test it yourself, especially when the package from your version of ubuntu has been used in the new version, duh, of course the bug is still there, it's the same pac

Applications develop to a platform. While Wine is technically a platform... it's raison d'être is to emulate the Windows platform. So... asking Windows developers to support it is essentially double-think. You're writing to the emulation platform and not the platform it's supposed to be emulating.

For arguments sake lets say the Redhat or the Debian group came out and said they were going to recognize applications that ran on the Linux

I agree. I think it would be more beneficial to get these apps either ported fully to Linux (using the native toolkits or WineLib; take your pick), or have them work with the Wine developers to document flaws in their library implementations and help patch it up.

Having dabbled on Wine a looong time ago (I think my last contributions were in 96 or 97?), let me say that this is a very difficult problem to solve. It's easy to get the first 80% done, but the last 20% can be maddening. Trying to bridge betwee

I think you'll find a lot of other scientific software is also designed to be cross platform in that way.

There is also some commerical software which is cross platform from dotnet to mono and has official linux support - but I can't give you an example which is paticularly stable on either platform. I really don't know if the blame can be laid on dotnet or the developers using it - and mono is playing catchup which adds in a few more quirks (libexif as a dependancy to run purely text based stuff?).

I was at the credit union today waiting literally hours for a banker-type person to do their job. On the table, a CU industry magazine. I picked it up and started flipping through it. (Interesting how every article followed the same exact business-like structure and format, no matter what the topic.) One of the ads was for some kind of "check transport" device. The thing that zips your check through a U-turn and puts a timestamp or something on it, I think. At the bottom of the ad in big bold letters was the statement:

Compatible with all versions of Windows and Linux with WINE.

I was floored. I got that same feeling as the first few times I started seeing World Wide Web URLs pop up on billboards and on TV commercials. Or when random people would find out I was a computer nerd and ask if I knew that Linux program (pronounced with a long 'I').

Put simply, these things teach me that just as there was not really a definitive "year of the Internet," there won't be a "year of Linux" either.Linux's growth has and always will be slow but steady. The nature of software and the I.T. marketplace will demand that more and more software be portable, available, and just generally flexible. That software which isn't will be replaced by that which is. These are a few of the cornerstones of open source after all, and the proprietary vendors would do themselves a favor to realize this for themselves.

Until the cost of producing the software, is dwarfed by the income from it, it's not going to be very likely, you might fine if they did do it, they'd have to staticly compile the whole thing, and it'd make the windows and mac versions look "lite" compared to it.

Why would they have to statically compile it? Adobe is a fairly big customer of the Qt toolkit, which most distros have dynamic libraries already installed (or at least in the repository). Photoshop is an image editor where they are mostly just modifying memory, they shouldn't need to write much (if any) platform specific code if they did it properly (although being a legacy app that's not very likely at this point).

My computer is a tool. Software is my job, not my religion. If I can increase my productivity or otherwise enjoy life better by using a win32 binary in wine rather than a Free version which may or may not be available, I'll use wine without even feeling guilty. Ahh, true freedom.

Then you get the inhouse app that everyone has to have which requires MS Access or whatever VB is these days (broken java?). Instead of an expensive mass migration back to MS Windows due to somebody not having the skill or foresight to put a web front end on their oversized macro you can probably get it going under wine.

Agreed. For instance, ies4linux. I love the fact that I can run IE 5.5, 6, and 7 concurrently to test web apps and make sure they run right. This doesn't hurt Linux at all. It makes it more attractive to people that have to test with IE. My only other alternative is to run Windows in a VM, which requires purchasing a Windows license.

but in hindsight, as projects like Wine or Reactos have evolved and improved,MS has been forced to constantly tweak and change their so called standard win32 api.it has been a moving target.now by companies and projects officially supporting Wine,the open source community have taken control of the standard.

write once and run anywhere.

they've taken the Embrace and Extend system MS has used against everyone else and turned it on it's ear.